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Further Reading

It started with the $329 iPad back in April, a compelling tablet that’s both good and cheap enough to entice upgraders and people who have never bought a tablet before. And it continued in June, with new 10.5- and 12.9-inch iPad Pros with high-end screens and powerful specs that make them look and feel a lot more “pro” than they did before.

This is all really good, compelling, well-differentiated hardware, and it has paid off for Apple so far—the new tablet drove year-over-year iPad sales up for the first time in more than three years. While it’s not clear where the trendlines are ultimately heading, Apple has to be happy that the tablet it has described as “the future of computing” doesn’t appear to be in terminal decline.

Today, the good news for the iPad continues with the public release of iOS 11. There’s a lot of stuff in this update, and a bunch of it benefits iPhone owners, too. But Apple has put a lot of work into the iPad-related parts of the operating system this year—the tablet still exists somewhere in between the iPhone and the Mac, but the changes to the UI and to the underpinnings of iOS 11 help iPads move further toward the Mac than they’ve ever been before. The upgrade is even more significant for tablets than iOS 9, both because the changes are bigger and because more iPads can actually take advantage of all these fancy productivity features now.

Further Reading

In this review, I’ll be focusing on iOS 11 features that are available to current phones and tablets that are updating from iOS 10. If you want to know about things that are specific to the three new iPhones that Apple announced last week, those will be covered in a separate review to come.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

Second, the new widgets hide a lot of functionality behind taps, long presses, or 3D Touches, and there’s really no way to know how a given button will respond to any of those before you actually try to interact with it. Some buttons open up a separate menu. Some don’t have anything extra to show you. You’ll need to spend a few minutes poking and prodding each button to figure out what it can do.

That's been a problem since iOS7. Jony Ive's whole rush to dump skeuomorphism resulted in tons of non-obvious UI features, like buttons that look like text labels. iOS10 was a little better than its predecessors, and it looks like iOS11 is another step towards a good-looking, clean UI, but overall it's still lacking the kind of cues users need to use a UI smoothly from the very start.

Quote:

The most glaring omission is any kind of support for third-party Control Center widgets, but Apple often builds new features and APIs for itself to use before opening them up to developers. The ability to show or hide the shortcuts plus the way the Control Center can now scroll up and down when it can’t fit all your controls on one screen (on the iPad, the section of the screen dedicated to the Control Center just expands while the area reserved for running apps gets pushed farther left) means that it would be relatively simple to handle an influx of new controls from third-party developers. Maybe in iOS 12.

C'mon, you didn't think Apple would let anyone else in their control panel, did you? They still can't be bothered to let you opt to use Waze and Spotify instead of Apple Maps and Apple Music.

Has Apple brought the rebels who design the Apple Music UI under control, yet? If they are allowed to have their own airplay icon that looks different from the system wide icon (the problem in a nutshell) I'm gonna lose it.

Regarding 32 bit apps, will they still be stored on their store servers, such that older fully 32 bit devices can download a "last compatible version" at least? The real death of them will be if they purge them even for older devices.

For me the best part is close to a billion users (iPhone and iPad) are all going to get this update, at the same time, and for free. Which also means developers can code for the newest features and still be assured a large base of potential customers.

Regarding 32 bit apps, will they still be stored on their store servers, such that older fully 32 bit devices can download a "last compatible version" at least? The real death of them will be if they purge them even for older devices.

Yes, they will still be available to download on devices running older versions of iOS.

@Andrew. When setting up a new iphone with ios 11 and you already have an old iphone with ios 11 does it only transfer settings? or can all photos, videos etc be transferred from the old phone to the new phone?

Is there a way to convert all existing photos/videos in your library to the new formats on a device that supports encoding? I like to keep all my pictures locally on my phone, taking up some 10GB, and it'd be nice to effectively halve that by converting it all.

Being in the beta program meant that i had opportunity to install the GM a week ago... big deal /sarcasm

The 5Ghz wifi still is flaky (my guess is when they fixed that security issue with wifi it “broke” 5Ghz wifi... it works, but sometimes web sites just hang... switching back to 2.4 fixes it, and if you switch back to 5Ghz also fixes it for while until the next hang.(It might be do to the ipad going to sleep)

...it is annoying because having 250/20 internet.. i can can the full speed over wifi 5Ghz, (on the dslreports speed test) ....But since the 5Ghz so times drops out, need to use 2.4Ghz... BTW, yes i know 250/20 over wifi, surfing is moot point compared to 2.4Ghz...

Is there a way to convert all existing photos/videos in your library to the new formats on a device that supports encoding? I like to keep all my pictures locally on my phone, taking up some 10GB, and it'd be nice to effectively halve that by converting it all.

You'd think that would be a natural part of the iCloud Photo Library: to reduce space on the iCloud versions and then when they are locally retrieved you get the newly formatted version. I doubt this'll happen though.

Over the past few iOS releases, and with two generations of iPad Pro devices, Apple has paid lip service to this future. But with iOS 11, finally, Apple has found its inner ambition.

And it is a mess.

It’s a mess because there’s no such thing as iOS anymore. Instead, this system is being tailored to work differently on different devices. --There are a few arguments to be made about how people just adapt to what they use. But that’s where iOS really lets down the typical user. Because it works differently across devices, users will face a learning curve every single time they acquire a new device or upgrade to iOS 11 on any device. That is, you don’t just learn iOS 11 once. You have to relearn it on each device to some degree. And then remember what the differences are when you move between them.

My snarky response to his review is "I guess a long-time Windows devotee would know a UI/UX mess when they saw one."

My real response is, this is a non-issue. The core UI interactions are broadly the same, and to the extent that the iPad is different from the iPhone, 80% of the differences have been there since at least iOS 9. The cool thing about the iPad updates is that if you still want to use your tablet as a giant iPhone, it works pretty much the same way it always has; there's just more stuff there for people who want it.

The iPhone X and its lack of a Home button are going to be more jarring/unmooring than the iPhone/iPad divide, by far.

Over the past few iOS releases, and with two generations of iPad Pro devices, Apple has paid lip service to this future. But with iOS 11, finally, Apple has found its inner ambition.

And it is a mess.

It’s a mess because there’s no such thing as iOS anymore. Instead, this system is being tailored to work differently on different devices. --There are a few arguments to be made about how people just adapt to what they use. But that’s where iOS really lets down the typical user. Because it works differently across devices, users will face a learning curve every single time they acquire a new device or upgrade to iOS 11 on any device. That is, you don’t just learn iOS 11 once. You have to relearn it on each device to some degree. And then remember what the differences are when you move between them.

My snarky response to his review is "I guess a long-time Windows devotee would know a UI/UX mess when they saw one."

My real response is, this is a non-issue. The core UI interactions are broadly the same, and to the extent that the iPad is different from the iPhone, 80% of the differences have been there since at least iOS 9. The cool thing about the iPad updates is that if you still want to use your tablet as a giant iPhone, it works pretty much the same way it always has; there's just more stuff there for people who want it.

The iPhone X and its lack of a Home button are going to be more jarring/unmooring than the iPhone/iPad divide, by far.

Thank you so much for that reply...it's useful.

Thurrott is who he is, but I do think he tries to be sincere:

Quote:

I recently spent a ton of time investigating whether Windows 10 S makes any sense at all. And when I discovered that it doesn’t, I reexamined Chrome OS for the upteenth time and discovered, somewhat to my dismay, that that OS actually makes tons of sense. And it does so in a traditional PC form factor, in this case a laptop, that is inexpensive, easy to use, and instantly productive.

But as noted, I’ve really struggled to make that work with iPad Pro and iOS 11. I’ve tried again and again to adapt the way I work so that this combination makes sense. And it simply does not. Not for me.

Over the past few iOS releases, and with two generations of iPad Pro devices, Apple has paid lip service to this future. But with iOS 11, finally, Apple has found its inner ambition.

And it is a mess.

It’s a mess because there’s no such thing as iOS anymore. Instead, this system is being tailored to work differently on different devices. --There are a few arguments to be made about how people just adapt to what they use. But that’s where iOS really lets down the typical user. Because it works differently across devices, users will face a learning curve every single time they acquire a new device or upgrade to iOS 11 on any device. That is, you don’t just learn iOS 11 once. You have to relearn it on each device to some degree. And then remember what the differences are when you move between them.

It's a good point, but overstated. The beginning of this review really drives home the point of how complicated IOS - and devices in general - have become. But they are really powerful and capable and Apple does have a huge hardware range now, which is fine since they're the biggest OEM in the world (or nearly, whatever). Diversification is ok when you're as B-I-G big as Apple is.

Could they do more with branding or spinoffs to signal this? Of course, but it's Apple, they're stubborn.

What is amazing is that IOS is stretching farther than Android in many ways. It's better as a large tablet, a 4" phone and as a TV device, than Google has managed with Android. And Google appears to be going backwards.

Has Apple brought the rebels who design the Apple Music UI under control, yet? If they are allowed to have their own airplay icon that looks different from the system wide icon (the problem in a nutshell) I'm gonna lose it.

That icon is now also used in Control Centre to switch audio playback from target to target. The old (rectangular) AirPlay icon is now used only for AirPlaying video, and the new one (with concentric circles) is used for more general 'wireless audio', be that via AirPlay or Bluetooth.